Tuesday, November 15, 2011

John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers

(33:45-35:53 from John Gruber's keynote speech at The Çingleton Symposium, a conference which took place in Montréal on October 14th and 15th, 2011)

One simple way to look at it is that there are far more people who've never bought an iPhone and who've never bought an iPad, who will in the next five years than all of us who've already bought at least one to this point. And I don't see how anybody can deny that, unless something unbelievable, dramatic changes. That's certainly the way everything is going now. If you think this app store platform is big now, you really haven't seen anything yet. At an event last week, Tim Cook had a line - he said, 'This is an extraordinary time to be at Apple'. And He is definitely right. But I say to you, 'This is an extraordinary time to be an Apple developer' .This is the right time and the right place. This is a once in a career opportunity. This is like being a Rock and roll musician in the late sixties. This is like being a film maker in the seventies following Scorsese, Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (when he was sane). If things go right, if things go the way I think they are going to go, these next five years, we are never going to work harder, we are never going to be under more pressure, we're never going to be more stressed, we are never going to feel like we have to work faster and we are never going to have to solve tougher problems. We're never going to have to move this fast. But the only thing any of us are going to regret is if we don't aim big enough. If you don't feel that you're now in a position to do the best work of your entire career, to look back and say, 'This was the time, I was there, I did this, I helped make this thing a reality', then you need to find a new position. This chance will never come again. And we are lucky, we're so unbelievably, incredibly lucky that it even came this once. Thank You.